Including 791 at the Hands of the Syrian and Russian Regime
SNHR has published its periodic death toll report for the month of October 2016 in which it documented the killing of1106 civilians at the hands of the main influential parties in Syria.
The report notes that SNHR team encounters difficulties in documenting victims from armed opposition factions as many of those victims are killed on battlefronts and not inside cities. Also, we aren’t able to obtain details such as names, pictures and other important details on account of the armed opposition forces’ unwillingness to reveal such information for security concerns among other reasons. Therefore, the actual number of victims is much greater than what is being recorded.
On the other side, the report affirms that it is almost impossible to access information about victims from government forces or from ISIS and the margin of error is considerably higher due to the lack of any applicable methodology in this type of documentation. The Syrian government and ISIS don’t publish, reveal, or record their victims. From our perspective, the statistics published by some groups on this category of victims are fictitious and are not based on any actual data.
Therefore, the report only incudes civilian victims who were killed by all parties and compare them.
The report breaks down the death toll of October 2016 where government forces killed 497 civilians including 113 children (Four children are killed every day) and 92 women in addition to 24 civilians who died due to torture.
Out of the total number of civilian victim, 42% were children and women which is an explicit indicator on the deliberate targeting of civilians by the government forces.
The report notes that forces we believe are Russian killed 294 civilians including 81 children and 48 women.
Additionally, the report documented the killing of four civilians including one child and one woman at the hands of the Self-management forces (Primarily consisting of the Democratic Union Party forces – branch for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party)
Furthermore, the report notes that ISIS killed 129 civilians including 32 children and seven women while Fateh Al Sham Front killed three civilians.
The report also records that 81 civilians, including 24 children and nine women, were killed by armed opposition factions.
Also, the report records that 51 civilians, including 14 children and 11 women, were killed the international coalition forces in October.
The report documents that 47 civilians, including nine children and one woman, have either died drowning as they were fleeing by sea or in bombings that SNHR hasn’t been able to identify its perpetrators or were carried out by unidentified armed groups to SNHR.
The report emphasizes that government forces and Russian forces have violated the international human rights law which guarantees the right to life. Furthermore, evidences and proofs, according to hundreds of eyewitnesses’ accounts, suggest that 90% at least of the widespread and single attacks were directed against civilians and civil facilities.
Also, extremist Islamic groups have committed a number of extrajudicial killings that constitute war crimes.
Moreover, some of the armed opposition factions committed crimes of extrajudicial killing that qualify as war crimes. Also, Self-management forces and international coalition forces have both committed war crimes that manifested in the crime of extrajudicial killing.
The report calls on the Security Council and the international community to uphold their responsibilities in relation to the crimes of killing that is being perpetrated ceaselessly and to apply pressure on the Syrian government to stop the deliberate and indiscriminate bombardment of civilians.
Finally, the report considers the Russian regime, all Shiite militias, and ISIS as foreign parties that are effectively involved in the killings and holds all of these parties and the financiers and supports of the Syrian regime legally and judicially responsible.